Supportsoft Glossary

How Search Engines Index Digital Content

Search engines use a process called crawling to find and comprehend material online. They create a copy of any page they locate and may include this information in their database.

Crawlers are automated applications designed to crawl web pages much like humans. They crawl web pages by following links from one page to another. A major difference between crawlers and humans is that crawlers must deal with millions, while humans will only deal with dozens of links.

As a crawler crawls, it determines what content is present on the web page, how it is arranged and how it relates to other pages on the internet. The crawler also checks for several factors such as speed, mobile friendliness, metadata and structured data. These variables contribute to the eventual indexing and ranking of the web page by the search engines.

There are two sets of rules regarding how a crawler can access a site. The site's owner can specify what content a crawler may or may not access using tools such as a robots.txt file or a meta tag. A crawler can only crawl URLs that are allowed by these directives.

Crawling is critical for web page visibility. If a crawler cannot access a page due to a misplaced link, server failure or other issues, the content on that page may never show in search engine results.